


Outrun by Ghosts

by shootingstarcipher



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Instability, Romance, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 16:39:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12324837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shootingstarcipher/pseuds/shootingstarcipher
Summary: In the corner of the cellar, which Eddie never did like going into, was a cupboard whose key had been missing for quite some time. And in that cupboard, he found what appeared to be the remnants of someone’s sleeping arrangements, consisting of a ragged old pillow, a scrap of clothing (presumably used for a blanket), a small scattering of biscuit crumbs and a half-empty bottle of water – upon which a handwritten note proclaimed “Property of Richie Tozier”.





	Outrun by Ghosts

The most unusual occurrence that day – at least so far – was that after Eddie had run home from school as he did on any other day, taking care not to mix with any other children apart from Bill and Stan (the only two he trusted enough to stop and talk to for a while), he found the house completely empty. It seemed even colder than usual – and October in Derry was often quite cold – and lonelier. He was used to not mixing with other people his age but his mother was almost always by his side, school being the only time when she wasn’t. He even knocked on her bedroom door (he wasn’t allowed to open it as that was just bad manners, especially without knocking) and called to her, anxiously asking if he was there, but no-one called back.

He kept shouting until the alarm on his watch rang, reminding him of his so-called illness. He swallowed his pills without a thought, having to take them for so long making it second nature to him. The watch beeped, he swallowed a couple of pills. His life revolved around them but he didn’t really mind. It made his mother happy, after all. And she only wanted the best for him; she was only doing her job, protecting him.

Searching the rest of the house – all the while frantically telling himself she was probably just out shopping – took almost twenty minutes, mostly due to the countless breaks he had to have to calm his shaky breaths with his inhaler, which he never went without. His heart stopped dead when it came to the cellar. It was always the coldest, darkest and downright creepiest part of the house and he made several excuses not to search it, each one being quickly beaten down by the fact that he didn’t know what to do when his mother wasn’t there. Standing on the first step, he took a deep breath and called to her, praying that she’d answer and come running up to him immediately. She didn’t.

With his hand pressed flat against the wall, poised to strike the moment a light switch hit his fingertips, he delved deeper into the cellar, each step trembling more than the last. Eventually a bare light bulb flickered on and his eyes adjusted to the newfound light while his body tried to cope with the dramatic loss of heating. If he’d thought it was cold upstairs, the cellar was virtually freezing. But he could see clearly that no-one was there, that there was no sign of his mother at all.

As he turned his back on the cobweb-ridden clutter, preparing to leave, an unlocked cupboard creaked open behind him, the sound drawing him to it. His head whipped round first and then the rest of his body followed, eyes trained on the cupboard door in the darkest corner of the room. Fear attempted to glue his feet in place but curiosity overcame him, pulling him closer to it. Something was sticking out of the cupboard – an old scrap of clothing, perhaps? It was red and thin, stretched out and unwearable. But as he grew closer, he saw that it was not red. It was a dirtied white and bloodstained.

He held his breath, hand gripping his inhaler in case he found himself unable to breathe, and peered inside the cupboard. It smelled of smoke, the cinders and stubbed out cigarette ends providing some explanation for it. His mother would have gone mad if she found out. She hated smoking. She said it was poison. Unless, of course, that was where she went to smoke in secret? Eddie shook that thought out of his head the moment it entered it. If he couldn’t trust her to never lie to him, then who could he trust?

There were no matches or lighters, Eddie noted, staring at the peculiar contents of the cupboard as he covered his mouth, coughing into his hand at the smell. But there was a pillow – one that he recognised, the case being a faded yellow in colour and depicting a fierce looking greyscale car. He remembered then that a year or so ago, during his first year of middle school, his pillow seemed to have gone missing without a trace. Well, at least now he knew where it had gotten to.

And beside the pillow was a small scattering of crumbs which Eddie suspected were the remnants of biscuits but he couldn’t be sure, as they could have easily been something else like crackers or a great deal of other foods. His gaze then gravitated towards a bottle of water that was only half-full and the paper label that had been stuck onto it. “Property of Richie Tozier” it read in messy handwriting scrawled in murky blue ink.

And there was, at that moment, only one thought in Eddie Kaspbrak’s mind: “Who the fuck is Richie Tozier?”

The sound of movements coming from upstairs – the floorboards above him creaking under the weight of something that must have been profoundly sinister – stirred within him another layer fear and his shaky breathing returned, his heart leaping up into the back of his throat as he considered that whoever this Tozier person was, they must have been hiding down there in the cellar for an absurd amount of time, and anyone who would hide in someone’s cellar for approximately a year couldn’t have been a particularly friendly person – why else would they need to hide?

His heart racing so much he was afraid it might burst, he scanned the shadowy cellar for place to hide, leapt at the light switch to turn it off and dived behind a jagged stack of cardboard boxes no-one had even remembered were down there. Suddenly unable to breathe, he held his inhaler up to his mouth and tried to ignore the growing volume of the footsteps as they neared the entrance to the cellar. Eventually, everything went quiet.

“Eddie, sweetie, are you home? I’m getting worried now, Eddie.” Spitting out his inhaler, Eddie let out a sigh of relief and scrambled to his feet, calling back to his mother as soon as he’d caught his breath back. He heard her let out a sigh too and he raced back up the steps, throwing his arms around her with more enthusiasm than he had done in a long time. He couldn’t recall ever being happier to see her, but there was one terrifying thought still lurking at the back of his mind.

“Someone’s living down there,” he blurted out, pointing in the direction of the cellar. “I swear it. You have to come and see.” Wriggling out of her grasp, he tugged on her hand in an attempt at convincing her to check the cupboard in the corner of the cellar.

She didn’t budge. “Don’t be so silly, Eddie. There’s no-one down there.” He opened his mouth to argue that no, they weren’t down there right at that moment but they had been for a long time, and they were going to come back soon – they’d left their things behind, so of course they were going to come back for them at some point. But she silenced him with a swift wave of her hand a cold glare that meant to shut up and let her speak. “I’m going to make dinner. Don’t you have homework to do?”

Nodding solemnly, he shut his mouth and headed to his room, sending one final glance in the cellar’s direction on his way passed. Richie Tozier would be back soon – he knew it – and when he did return, Eddie was determined to catch him in the act. For the next hour, while he lay splayed out on his bed as he tried to concentrate on his homework, all he could really think about was this Tozier person and who he really was. How old was he? Was he some creepy old man who’d been spying on him and his mother for the past year or was he just a troubled teen, some kind of runaway or an escapee from a prison or some other kind of horrible place? None of them were particularly favourable options and if Eddie Kaspbrak had had his way no-one would have been secretly living in his house in the first place. And yet somebody clearly was.

He’d just about managed to write the first paragraph of his essay when his mother yelled to him from the kitchen. He leapt out of bed immediately, his body craving food as a result of him not having eaten since breakfast (his lunch had been taken from him by the local gang of bullies that morning and, being too weak to grab it back from only one teenager, he wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of getting it back from the four ridiculously tall, extremely volatile tyrants who so often enjoyed tormenting him) and darted into the kitchen, his mother frowning at his eagerness as he sat down opposite her at the small mahogany table. 

“You hungry?” she asked suspiciously, raising an eyebrow at her cowering son.

“It looks delicious,” he commented, nodding at the meal on his plate and carefully evading her question, but she stared at him until he answered, refusing to let him eat until she was satisfied. “I uh… I forgot my lunch this morning,” he stammered, hoping she’d be happy with his response.

“Oh, and your so-called friends didn’t give you any of theirs?” He was about to shake his head when she carried on speaking without waiting for a reply. “Just as well – they probably would have given you some kind of hideous disease. You know what they’re like.” He nodded silently, eyes glued to his plate. He hated it when she insulted them, even though she was probably right. But he secretly thought that she didn’t know them well enough to speak about them like that. “Eat up then, Eddie. And straight to bed afterwards, alright?” He nodded even though she didn’t really care whether he agreed or not – it was still light outside but she wouldn’t have been interested (or even tolerant) of any smart remarks he had to offer – so he wolfed down his food without giving it a moment’s thought.

He stayed up until almost midnight, by which time he had managed to finish his homework, though he knew his mother had expected him to be asleep within half a hour of him going to bed. He kept as quiet as possible while he stayed awake, knowing he’d be in a whole heap of trouble if she found out he wasn’t asleep, even if he was using his time to do his homework.

And when he laid down and closed his eyes, his thoughts turned back to the mysterious Richie Tozier.

He must have been back now and Eddie was tempted to go and confront him in the cellar, eager to find out just who this person was. But there was also a feeling dread welling up inside his being, the idea that an act as strange as living in secret in another’s family home could only be committed by someone dangerous and unpredictable keeping him glued to the bed, frozen in fear at the thought.

He was still thinking about it when he fell asleep, and even when he woke up the next morning. He was awake before his mother and he did then slip into the cellar alone, switching on the flickering light and staring at the cupboard in the corner, even though it was barely visible in such bad lighting. He stood at the top of the steps with his back to the door, ready to run for it if necessary, but made as little noise as possible, not wanting to alert the intruder to his presence. 

The cupboard door stayed closed. Eddie waited there on the steps, his gaze unwavering, for several minutes until eventually turning away, the room fading back into darkness as he shut the door behind him and headed for the kitchen. Feeling unable to eat much, he left half of his breakfast and added that to what he was already taking for lunch, though he kept it in a separate bag and hoped Bowers’ gang would at least leave him that to eat at lunchtime if nothing else. Once he’d gotten ready for school (even though his mother still wasn’t up and about) he contemplated going back into the cellar but quickly decided against it, his fear and anxiety getting the better of him as they so often did.

He stayed inside his room instead, the feeling that something was watching him attaching itself to him the moment he stepped foot inside the room. Sitting on the edge of his bed, his legs dangling over the side, feet barely scraping the floor, he picked up his journal from the nightstand and flicked through the pages to the first blank one, neatly jotting down that day’s date in pencil at the top of the page. He dropped his pencil then. It landed on the carpeted floor with a soft clatter and rolled under the bed.

Forgetting his fear momentarily, Eddie leaned down to pick it up only to come to face to face a with a sheepish-looking, messy-haired stranger. “Richie Tozier?” his mind screamed at him, freezing him with shock. When he eventually moved away, sitting back up on the bed and breathing heavily into his inhaler, desperately trying to decide what to do next, the boy crawled out from under the bed, stood up and stared at him, neither of them daring to speak.

He was taller than Eddie though looked to be about the same age as him, with dark wavy hair that fell gently around his face and looked as though it hadn’t been cut in quite a while. His dusky eyes were shielded by a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and his aura of shyness had almost completely vanished, his coy smile replaced with a grin. “You must be Eddie, right? Sorry about that,” he added without waiting for an answer. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

His gaze was intimidating – though he wasn’t sure it was intended that way – and so Eddie shuffled backwards, cowering slightly under his stare. “You didn’t... scare me,” he lied, grasping his inhaler tightly with one hand. He wanted to ask who he was – aside from the fact that he must have been Richie Tozier and that he’d been sleeping in their cellar for God knows how long, he knew absolutely nothing about him – but he was finding it hard enough to breathe without trying to speak on top of that, so he stayed silent while he tried to calm himself down.

“You won’t make me leave, will you? I’ve got nowhere else to go.” Suddenly he no longer seemed so intimidating and Eddie’s heartbeat started to slow, his lungs filling up with air much more easily than before. He was just a kid, after all, like him. 

Taking a deep breath, Eddie asked how long he’d been staying there. Although his voice came out shaky, he felt somewhat more confident around the stranger than he had done before and made space for him on the bed, allowing him to sit down beside him. “You must have been for about a year, I’m guessing. But why?”

The stranger shrugged and dropped his gaze to the floor but came up with an answer a mere few seconds later. “I got kicked out. My parents used to… never mind,” he added after trailing off, and Eddie had to admit he was intrigued by the boy’s past though he didn’t want to demand answers (although perhaps he should have, since he was the one who’d been living in his house undetected and uninvited for the last year). “All you need to know is that it was pretty bad, Eds, so really it was kind of a blessing when they kicked me out-”

“It’s Eddie,” the younger boy interrupted, his voice sounding much softer and quieter than he’d wanted it to.

Richie carried on as if he the interjection hadn’t happened. “But then I had nowhere to go. I slept on the streets for a while and about three weeks and two muggings later, I wound up here. The door was unlocked so I snuck in and… and I guess I just ended up staying. I have no money or anything, I’m too young to work and I don’t wanna steal, so living in someone else’s house is my only option.”

“Wait,” Eddie started hesitantly, shuffling away from him slightly. “Were you the one being mugged or did you mug someone else?”

“I was mugged.” Eddie began to relax at that, but then quickly realised he was about to be late for school unless he left within the next few minutes. He practically lunged out of bed, hurriedly grabbing at his schoolbag and explaining his sudden departure to the stranger in his room in a ramble, telling him he’d meet him in the cellar after school and to stay out of sight until then. He darted out the door so fast he didn’t even hear Richie Tozier’s sarcastic comment, but he did have time to wonder what he was planning on doing about the stranger on the way to school.

When he met with Bill and Stan at the entrance, he still hadn’t come up with a plan – so he began to wonder what Richie’s was.


End file.
